PIM Definition and Description

Answering the requirement of the Model-Driven Architecture approach, as well as the general needs of engineering process definition, requires to precisely define the content and structure of the different models to be produced at project development time. For each model, the following questions must have an answer: What are its content and its objectives? What are the modelling concepts to be used to build the model? What are the well-formedness rules? How should the model be structured? How do I proceed to build the model? Using the OMG’s Model-Driven Architecture approach for software engineering, the article introduces Model Driven Engineering basic principles, and then, based on these principles, defines and describes a number of different platform-independent models (PIMs) for a software system, corresponding to different abstraction levels in the system modelling of a particular domain. The PIMs are fully defined from the well-known standard general purpose modelling language, i.e. the Unified Modelling Language (UML).